Tbilisi: Eduard Shevardnadze, ex-president of Georgia and former Soviet foreign minister, has died aged 86, his personal assistant said on Monday.
Marina Davitashvili said Shevardnadze had died after a long illness. She did not give any further details.
Shevardnadze was a hero in the West for helping to end the Cold War as the last Soviet foreign minister, before suffering a dramatic fall from grace as president of his native Georgia.
The veteran statesman won the highest praise for his time as former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's chief diplomat, when he negotiated arms-reduction treaties with the United States and brokered the deal that brought down the Berlin Wall.
"I am not sure that the Cold War could have ended peacefully without him. He changed all our lives.... The man's a hero," former US Secretary of State James Baker, who spent long hours at the negotiating table with Shevardnadze, said in 2000.
But his overthrow in Georgia's 2003 Rose Revolution saw thousands dancing and singing in the streets of the capital Tbilisi, in scenes eerily reminiscent of the celebrations that Shevardnadze helped spark more than a decade earlier in Berlin, Prague and other eastern European cities.
His 10 years as leader of Georgia left the country mired in poverty and chaos. Shevardnadze salvaged what remained of his reputation only by stepping down in 2003 in the face of mass protests, avoiding the bloodshed many feared if he had tried to cling to power.